Doctors Slam Proposed Food Stamp Cuts: ‘The Dumbest Thing You Can Do Is Cut Nutrition’

BY SY MUKHERJEE/Think Progress

Doctors have a message for congressional lawmakers inching toward a compromise farm bill that would cut food stamps by nine billion dollars: It’s a terrible idea.

“If you’re interested in saving health care costs, the dumbest thing you can do is cut nutrition,” Dr. Deborah Frank of Boston Medical Center explained in an interview with the Associated Press. “People don’t make the hunger-health connection.”

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) offers benefits to over 47 million Americans. But the benefit level has fallen to the point that recipients only get about $1.40 per person per meal, even though food stamps often constitute the entirety of a family’s food budget. Doctors and researchers say that additional cuts on the horizon could increase the incidence of medical problems stemming in part from food insecurity, particularly diabetes and its related conditions.

For instance, a 2013 study by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that House Republican proposals to slash food stamps would increase national health costs for diabetes treatment by $15 billion over a decade. Those costs would disproportionately affect Medicaid, since the public insurance program for the poor — who are considerably more likely to have type 2 diabetes — covers an outsize portion of diabetes spending.

A separate study published this week in the journal Health Affairs illustrates the effect that food insecurity can have on poor Americans’ health in concrete terms. Researchers found that the number of poor Americans being admitted to the hospital because of hypoglycemia — a sharp drop in blood sugar that can be a complication for people with type 2 diabetes — rose by 27 percent in the last week of a month as compared to the first week, since these low-income individuals began to run out of money to spend on food. Wealthier Americans did not experience an analogous spike.

“These findings suggest that exhaustion of food budgets might be an important driver of health inequities,” concluded the study authors.

The food stamp cuts could be particularly harmful for low-income diabetics who live in red states refusing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Researchers from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that uninsured Americans with diabetes are significantly less likely to have a regular source of medical care, to have had a check-up in the past two years, to have access to urgent medical care, and pay almost ten times more out-of-pocket to treat their diabetes than diabetics with Medicaid coverage.

Many of the Republican-led states rejecting the Medicaid expansion have some of the highest rates of diabetes in the country — and the coming SNAP cuts could mean more of them ending up in the hospital without the means to pay for their treatment.

GOP Push To Split Farm Bill Leaves Food Stamps Vulnerable To Severe Cuts

By Alan Pyke/Think Progress

A House Republican scheme to strip food stamp funding out of the farm bill would lead to the program being weakened or even outright dismantled, according to poverty experts. Reports indicate that GOP leaders are having trouble finding the votes to support a split farm bill so far, but the tens of millions of Americans who rely on food stamps would be at risk should the political winds shift.

“Splitting the farm bill is the wrong approach,” according to Dottie Rosenbaum, a Senior Policy Analyst specializing in food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It would not only end the long-standing, bipartisan practice of bringing together supporters of agriculture and food assistance programs to produce more sound policy,” she told ThinkProgress, “but it has the potential to force cuts to food assistance even deeper and more harmful than those already rejected by the House.”

Those cuts – $20.5 billion over a decade, largely from changes to eligibility rules that would kick 2 million poor Americans off the food aid rolls – meant the House’s original farm bill faced a narrow path to passage. Many Democrats were reportedly ready to hold their noses on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts and support the full package. ButRepublican leaders killed the bill by endorsing a last-minute amendment they knew Democrats couldn’t tolerate. After the bill failed, with dozens of Republicans who’d voted for the amendment that chased Democrats away still opposing the final vote, House leaders opted not to return to a version of the bill that could pass. Instead, they began exploring splitting the bill up.

“Splitting the Farm Bill is an act of political gamesmanship that leaves SNAP vulnerable to attack or outright neglect from Congress,” said Joy Moses, Senior Policy Analyst for the Center for American Progress’ Poverty and Prosperity Program. An action alert sent Tuesday night from the Food Research and Action Center, the national anti-hunger advocacy group that sponsors the “SNAP Challenge,” agreed that the plan “seems to be one more attempt to harm SNAP.”

Moses added that while “we recognize that the needs of food insecure Americans should stand alone in being critically important, the blending together of multiple interests has led to positive outcomes in the past.” Indeed, the decades-long linkage of the farm bill’s anti-poverty components and agricultural subsidy programs has helped protect SNAP from some of the “reform” efforts that have damaged other anti-poverty programs. The amendment that killed the bill in June was designed to replicate some of those failed reforms in the SNAP program. If food assistance is sliced out of the legislation, it would become even more vulnerable to such ill-advised changes.

Conservatives say SNAP is a troubled program in need of some tough love. But in fact it has one of the lowest fraud rates of any federal program, despite being among the largest. The agricultural subsidies component of the farm bill actually has a higher rate of erroneous payments than does SNAP. Furthermore, the vast majority of food stamp recipients who are able to work do so.

The program kept 4.7 million families out of poverty in 2011 alone, thereby juicing economic growth for the nation as a whole. The food charities conservatives expect to pick up the slack from food stamp cuts say they lack the resources to do so.

House Committee Votes To Take Food Stamps Away From Millions Of Low-Income Americans

By Zack Beauchamp/Think Progress

Today, the House Agriculture Committee approved the final version of the 2012 farm bill, complete with its draconian cuts for families struggling to put food on the table. The proposed bill cuts $35 billion from the federal food and nutrition budget, about $16.5 billion of which come from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — more commonly known as SNAP or food stamps.

The cuts work by eliminating “categorical eligibility,” which provides assistance to families whose assets or income put them slightly above the technical line for SNAP eligibility. Repealing categorical eligibility means that between two and three million Americans will lose access to food stamps and roughly 280,000 children will drop out of their automatic enrollment in the free lunch program at school. So the House bill has anti-hunger advocates up in arms:

“With the economy being in such bad shape, depriving that many people of nutritional assistance is going to have a devastating effect,” said Eric Olsen, [Feeding Hunger]’s senior vice president of government relations and public policy.

One needs simply to look to the story of Dorothy Moon, a stay-at-home mother in Texas whodepends on food stamps to feed her six children while her male partner looks for new work, to understand Olsen’s point. Of course, some in the GOP want to ignore “sob stories” about the plight of people who struggle to put food on the table.

SNAP assistance saved five million American from poverty in 2010 and halved the number of children in poverty in 2011.